The project I recently bought a few LED displays as a job lot which were parts for fruit machines; the type you see in the local pub and after testing them I found that they had a nice bright red / orange colour to them and decided to use them for a large clock project.…
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Category: Projects
Electronics circuits and projects
Buying cheap components from Chinese suppliers – win this time!
I have a couple of electronics projects in the works which use large LED displays and as they have a forward voltage of 8.4V and 20mA current they cannot be driven directly from a microcontroller using multiplexing. I could use a bunch of driver transistors or MOSFETS but that needs 14 pins on the microcontroller…
NTP clock only version of my ESP8266 based display
As there was interest I have released firmware for my YouTube statistics and clock internet connected display featured in my previous post for users who just want an NTP clock and don’t require the YouTube counter functions. This clock automatically gets the time from the NTP server and synchronises it with the software based RTC…
ESP8266 based NTP clock with YouTube statistics display
I made some internet connected 8 digit 7 segment LED displays using a NodeMCU and Harris semiconductor ICM7228A LED driver ICs the latter of which were salvaged from old aircraft avionics. As the chips would unlikely sell on eBay I decided to make them into a project and improve upon my earlier YouTube counter project…
1940’s National watch cleaning machine repair
I was given this machine to repair & restore – a National Electric watch cleaning machine Model 1 which dates from the 1940’s. It was in a very poor condition, rusty and all electrical parts visibly corroded and the original fabric insulation on the wiring had rotten. This was a very dangerous machine even when…
A small update to my dual colour pong clock
I’ve released a small update to my arduino controlled dual colour pong clock project (V1.24) which fixes flickering on the seven segment display when the LED matrix is being updated. The change basically stops the matrix from updating when it’s blank as it does not need to. I also made some tweaks to the brightness…
Bangood XL4016 adjustable voltage regulator first impressions
I am building a basic power supply for a project and decided to try one of the XL4016E1 based regulator modules commonly available on eBay, Amazon and Bangood which is advertised as being able to handle an 8A / 200W load. I only need up to 2A for my project but at £7.99 it seemed…
Using Arduino to control display module salvaged from LED sign.
I came across someone selling parts from a large LED sign on ebay which by doing some research came from a Data Display LED board originally used for movie name, showtimes and price information display in a cinema lobby. Their part number could be DL110 as that’s the only number I can find on the…
A constant current load using mosfet and LM358
In my below post I mentioned that I am building a bench PSU however I am still waiting for the parts to arrive. I decided to make a constant current load in order to test the electronic fuse and the power supply itself. I had built one before but the mosfet kept blowing after a…
Animated clock using 16×32 bi colour LED matrix modules
I finally got round to finishing the improved version of my earlier pong clock which used two single colour 16×24 led modules with a built in controller. This version can display 3 colours and has several different modes to the earlier version and also it can display scrolling graphics from the popular retro game, pac-man.…
A high capacity lithium battery tester with printout
I mentioned a while ago I had made a version of my single AA cell tester which can test high capacity LiFePO4 batteries with a nominal voltage of 24 volts (8 cells) which I had made for work as we supply 30 and 60 amp hour batteries which need to be tested. I have finally…
Arduino pump timer with GLCD
I’ve been making a timer for my garden watering system as I have bought a few cheap timers from Amazon / Ebay in the past but they were either rubbish or went faulty within a year so I decided to make my own. I used a 240×64 graphic LCD salvaged from an old & obsolete…